Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 185, tabled by my noble friend Lady Coffey.

Only about half a dozen noble Lords in the Committee at the moment have previously served as Members of Parliament. From my own experience, there is nothing more annoying as an MP than to find constituents writing to you about some planning development that you know nothing about when other stakeholders have been notified. The Member of Parliament must then ask the council, the Government or the agency what the issues are about before forming a view on it and either supporting the constituents’ concerns or not. Constituents simply do not understand why MPs are not already in the loop. That diminishes their status when it seems that every other Tom, Dick and Harry has been on the stakeholder consultation list.

I appreciate that this amendment is narrowly focused, with a much smaller range of stakeholders. However, the issue here, as my noble friend has said, concerns nationally significant infrastructure projects, where the Secretary of State is the decider. Therefore, while MPs might not be on the general planning consultation list, it would be reasonable for them to be on the list for these nationally significant infrastructure projects. The principle is the same. That is why I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Coffey.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, before I speak to my Amendment 185SG, can I thank colleagues from all parties across the Committee who have supported me, including the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, who is in Birmingham today?

I declare my interests relating to this amendment. I am the chairman of the 360 Degree Society. This is a national social business that is applying the lessons learned from over 40 years of practical work in east London to community developments across the UK. Today, my colleagues and I are focusing on integrated development and placemaking, with business, public and social sector partners. The relevant business partners for this amendment include Barratt Redrow, Kier Group, Morgan Sindall Group, HLM Architects, the NHS and various local authorities.

This amendment is aimed at preparing the ground for and supporting the Secretary State for Health Wes Streeting’s 10-year plan for the future of the health service as he seeks to move services out of hospitals and into the community. It is my view, and that of my colleagues with many years of experience, that the health service needs to get upstream into the prevention agenda and move services out of expensive hospitals and into the community. This Planning and Infrastructure Bill is about not just housing but building truly joined-up places and cultures, where families want to live and where communities can thrive. It is my experience that the built environment and culture are profoundly connected. We really are the places that we live, work and play within.

Many of our inner cities and their fractured communities show the social costs of getting this wrong. This Bill and this amendment provide us with an opportunity to nudge the right direction of travel in a practical way, and it comes at a crucial time. So many previous attempts by government departments to encourage a more joined-up approach to development at a macro level have failed. I suggest that the opportunities to join the dots that make a real-world difference are in the micro, at place.

This amendment seeks both to support the Government’s desire to build 1.5 million homes and to ensure that we learn from the mistakes of the past. We need to create more joined-up services and communities and move beyond rhetoric into practice.

I could take noble Lords to so many places across the country where services are literally hiding behind their own fences and are not joined up, either physically at place or structurally in a co-ordinated operating culture. The main players barely know each other on the same street, yet they all work with the same families. This is an expensive disaster that continues to replicate. It needs to stop.

In new developments, we are still witnessing on the ground a fragmented health and community infrastructure. Not only are they not creating a sense of place but they are in danger of unintentionally repeating many of the same mistakes of large-scale housing developments of the past. We could be in the 1960s or 1970s: soulless housing estates, created by both the private and public sectors, that generate well-documented social and economic problems over time. Local communities need a soul and beating heart at their centre.

In the modern world, health is everybody’s business. It is no longer a matter for just the medical profession. The focus now rightly needs to be on the social determinants of health. We urgently need to build more joined-up social and health developments in local communities and neighbourhoods. In front of us is a real opportunity, as this Government commit themselves to building 1.5 million homes, to rethink the social, health and welfare infrastructure in these communities, and to bring together housing, health, education, welfare, and jobs and skills, truly encouraging innovation and more joined-up approaches.

Lots of research out there gives endless data on why all this makes sense; we just need to start doing it. One housing association’s social prescribing programme supported 277 people and reported a 90.8% change in their well-being. Mixed-use developments that blend residential, commercial, health and recreational spaces stimulate local economies by attracting businesses, creating jobs and prosperity. This research shows that the proximity of services encourages residents to shop and dine locally, creating a self-sustaining economic ecosystem. Siloed housing schemes are not only less effective but more expensive in the long run.

This amendment seeks to encourage closer working relationships between the public, private and social sectors so that, in this next major building phase, we actively encourage innovations, best practice and greater co-operation between these sectors. We cannot force people to work together, but we can actively encourage them to do so. We need to create learning-by-doing cultures across the country, which share best practice, as we set out on this new, exciting journey of housebuilding and infrastructure.

This amendment is a first attempt to find a form of words that encourages greater co-operation at place between the place-makers. The wording is not perfect and I am sure we can improve it, but it allows us to have a cross-party debate about the siloed machinery of the state that is not delivering the change that people want to see and experience. Very good people from different political parties have attempted, over the years, to mend these disconnects at departmental level. I have worked with many of them and this has proved really difficult to do. This amendment offers a simple, practical solution that encourages a direction of travel and a clear steer to practitioners and people of good will on the ground.

In my experience, what really counts when it comes to innovation and change is not diktats from government or more process and strategy, but transparent, joined-up, working relationships between partners involved on the ground. The siloed world of government is increasingly not fit for purpose and is daily hindering the very relationships we now need to bring together and help flourish.

The 360 Degree Society, which I help run, has a proven methodology that is enabling co-operation between major parties involved in place-making from the public, business and social sectors, and residents. There seems to be a consensus around what Wes Streeting is proposing for the future of the health service. We are at a moment where the players in local authorities, the NHS, the social and private sectors and housebuilders want to build a more joined-up world. We have all talked about joining up services and cultures; this amendment provides a practical next step on this journey.

Some of this is about ensuring that community infrastructure is an integrated part of large-scale developments and is created early on, rather than the last element to be built, but also that a much wider range of partners are involved in creating high-quality new places where people are healthy and can thrive and prosper. The 360 Degree Society, which I lead, has created a social value toolkit to explore the practicalities of how to do this. To take just one example, we suggest getting beyond the often confrontational, usually purely transactional approach between developers and local authorities and special interest groups to get to a place where there is a genuine commitment and endeavour to agree a shared vision for the place.

Our experience suggests that this is partly achieved by surprisingly straightforward changes, such as developing human relationships between key players and focusing on them. When we get to know someone, rather than just reading their papers and emails, it is surprising how often a way forward can be found. Relationships with the key players, rather than consulting and engaging absolutely everyone, are part of a way forward we suggest. The purpose of this amendment is to help create the appetite and desire to encourage colleagues to take this approach and encourage innovation in this space.

I was in east London recently, in a multi-million pound development. I was met by an African mother with two rather beautiful children. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent; the health centre is at one end of the estate, the community building at another, the nursery somewhere else and the school somewhere else. She described how her child was already picking up needles in the play area and she showed me a small video of two youths outside the housing association office jumping into a van and stealing the contents. The culture was already starting and I can imagine this mother already wondering—these estates need strong families —whether she was going to stay.

Let me briefly share with you a practical example of what success looks like in practice. My colleagues and I do not like papers; we tend to build practical examples with partners. In 2007, I was asked by Christine Gilbert, then CEO of Tower Hamlets Council, who went on to run Ofsted, to lead what became a multi-million pound development in Tower Hamlets, following a murder and considerable violence between two warring white and Bengali housing estates. The details of this development are in Hansard, because we debated it in the levelling-up Bill, but the basic points are: you had a failing school with a fence; next door, a failing health centre with a fence; attempts to build 600 homes that had spent £3 million on schemes, with not a flat built; and two warring communities, one Bengali and one white.

My colleagues and I spent time building relationships with local residents and with the local authority, the NHS and the housing association—top, middle and front line. We started with no investment and we have rebuilt a £40 million school; a £16 million health centre; 600 homes, with 200 for sale; and now a new primary school. In June, Professor Brian Cox and I did our 13th science summer school, and he led a masterclass at the end of the day; this school had involved 695 children and, at the end of the day, a group of them in a masterclass debated quantum physics—an extraordinary experience.

What were the lessons learned? First, it was not about structure but about people and relationships—

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

Order!

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

I am just about to finish. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, told us on Tuesday that there is a rising tide in this space. My suggestion is that we all need to grasp the moment or we will lose it yet again. The foundation stones need to be laid now. Let us take the first step together. I beg to move.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and the Committee for jumping ahead of him in speaking to my noble friend’s amendment. I had not clocked that he was due to speak and that it was his amendment. I apologise for my discourtesy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for his comprehensive reply.

The common theme between the amendments is empowering officials to do their job well. I will pick up an example from the noble Lord, Lord Mawson. If an official in the local hospital is only looking up the line to someone in the health department, it is very hard for them to take into account the needs of other aspects of the community.

If there is something in law or secondary legislation—whatever it is, I look forward to seeing it—that the Government produce that says, “You must consult, you must talk to these people and you must take them into account”, that empowers the official to do so. It does not make it happen, but it sets out a structure where we can communicate properly between silos. We can get things done as a community and not in little bits.

I am sure that we can all think of examples of where things would have been done much better if the community had been involved. In fact, we do not need to look much further than our own front door. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, has a lot of experience with construction, but when I took one of my friends who is in the industry through the front door and asked him how much he thought it cost, he was at about a 50th of what it was. We were not involved; the community was not consulted. This has been done to us; we were not part of that decision. The same applies to our “HMP Westminster”-style enclosure. I therefore really encourage the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, to work with my noble friends Lord Hayward and Lord Forsyth to see whether we can get our own mechanisms to be rather better than they are.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I have commented on the door and had conversations with various people around the House, which was very fascinating as a parable of this problem.

Christine Gilbert was a very good local authority leader who understood the limitations of the state and understood that just the processes and systems alone would not get us there. Something else needed to happen in which the local authority, the NHS and the normal players were obviously key partners. It was about the people and relationships; the machinery was not going to get us there, and she understood that as a very capable leader.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I also felt that the Minister’s reply to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was good, but I would be grateful if he could send him and us a link to the guidance that he referred to so that we can check through it and understand how it works before Report. In the case of my amendment, I await the Hillsborough law. If it can do what Amendment 158 is setting out to do and a lot more across government, it will make a huge contribution. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted that we have reached Committee, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on having tabled the first amendment for debate. I echo many of her comments and those of my noble friend Lady Scott. I greatly enjoyed the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt; it is great to see him in his new position. We very much enjoyed working with him when he was on the Front Bench, and we look forward to working with him in his new place.

My concern is not that I do not want to see the critical infrastructure and housing that we need—particularly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said, in rural areas. In fact, I would propose to add a little “subsection (e)” to her existing Amendment 1, to protect the countryside from overdevelopment, as well as to protect and promote food security; those issues should be at the heart of the Bill.

I was delighted to hear on “Farming Today” this morning—I obviously had an early start—the CPRE mention the protection it would like to see for affordable homes. It mentioned in its briefing that the current definition of affordable homes is not accurate and should be revisited. Can the Minister—with whom I look forward to collaborating through the passage of the Bill—say whether the Government are minded to do that? The plea from the CPRE—which I believe is appropriate to Amendment 1, and particularly to a hypothetical “subsection (e)”, which I may bring forward on Report if the amendment is brought back—is that, to protect the countryside, it would like a commitment from the Government to use brownfield land first. I wonder whether the Minister would agree to that. In the CPRE’s view:

“England has space for 1.2 million homes on previously developed land”.


The benefit of building in this type of area is:

“These homes would: be close to jobs, schools, and transport connections; regenerate town centres and urban communities; protect green spaces and farmland from development”.


My concern is that, without an amendment such as a hypothetical little “subsection (e)” to protect the countryside and food security, we risk trampling over the countryside and greenfield in a mad dash to build houses at pace.

The CPRE also says, quite rightly, that there is a role for planning. As a one-time Member of the other place, if there were a development in my constituency that looked as though it was going to be wildly unpopular with a village or rural community, I would always urge the developers to meet at the earliest opportunity with parish councils before the development got into the public domain. I believe that there should be—this view is also shared by the CPRE—a clear role for local planning committees in the context of the Bill and that the role of parish councils should be cherished and strengthened. Without that, we would remove grass-roots democracy.

I very much enjoyed the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on the environmental recovery programme, which is often at some distance from the damage being done. If Part 3 is to remain, I hope that it will cover the issues that were addressed successfully in the pilot project in rural North Yorkshire—the Slowing the Flow at Pickering flood scheme—where we have effectively protected the development downstream by having not a major reservoir but a small reservoir. The construction of bunds, alongside other projects such as chopping down trees and growing trees in appropriate places, has allowed us to slow the flow. It is that type of imaginative nature solution—working with nature by, for example, planting trees in appropriate places—that can achieve flood resilience and flood defences, while also not contributing to flooding going forward. I hope that the Government might be mindful of protecting the countryside and farmland for the food security that is urgently needed, while also strengthening grass-roots democracy in the way I have suggested.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I am sympathetic to these amendments, but I am also very sympathetic to what the Government are trying to achieve in getting things built.

My colleagues and I have been at the other end of this telescope in communities trying to build things and get things done. We are now at year 41 and probably nearly a thousand projects in—some have been very small; others, such as the Olympics, became quite big. You get a perspective from practice on all that, which might be helpful to this discussion. Many years ago, we came across the challenge of what we call the two Ds: democracy and delivery. What I discovered many years ago with an East End group of people, on a failing group of housing estates where everything was failing constantly, was that local people were fed up to the back teeth with endless chatter and endless promises by councillors, when nothing seemed to happen. We only really became credible in Bromley-by-Bow, and trust began to emerge, when we delivered our first nursery with local parents and their children, which made a difference to their lives, and began to take over a derelict park where people were injecting every day in a completely dysfunctional situation.

It might be just worth me sharing the reasons why we made certain long-term choices. When I arrived in Tower Hamlets in the early 1980s, it was profoundly dysfunctional. The schools did not succeed, and the roads did not get swept. Some 97% of everything was run by the state, and it was a terrible mess. I was a local clergyman arriving in a rundown church; 12 old people sat where they had always sat in a 200-seater church, and it looked as though the dead had been carried out and no one had noticed. I had £400 in the bank. The little problem for me was to ask myself: what on earth can I do about this? The answer was: I do not have the faintest idea. As a Yorkshireman, my initial instinct was to do a runner; it is all too much for me. Phillip, the Jewish headteacher across the road at the primary school, was retiring early because it had become too much for him, so I thought, “This is me in a few years’ time, falling off my trolley”—I was 29 then.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

My amendment is very modest. It is saying two things: first, impose strict deadlines for statutory consultations. We cannot have a situation where regulators do not respond and do what they are expected to do on time. We have to draw a line on that. Secondly, the council recommended international benchmarking. Regular international benchmarking of British project performance on infrastructure as compared with other countries would be very valuable indeed. It would be salutary because we would have it confirmed that, in general, we take longer, we cost more money and we get less outcome. This amendment would be helpful, and I hope noble Lords and the Government will be sympathetic. I beg to move.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I wish to say something about the housing regulator, because it is absolutely as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is saying. As I explained earlier, in our practical experience, we have built a very successful housing company with local residents, which is trying to join the dots between housing, education, health and placemaking. We find that the housing regulator is constantly getting in the way of the innovation that we, with local residents, need to do, which has local support and a serious track record.

This particular regulator—and I have seen it in other areas as well—is a real problem. There needs to be real thought and reflection about whether these regulators are helping us innovate and find new ways of working—or are they just getting in the way? Of course, they need to ask challenging questions on using the money right, I get all of that. We need to address these issues, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is telling us. It is stopping us in east London doing what we now need to do to take our work to the next stage.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

I want to say something about what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said about the default risk aversion, and how there is a significant risk of that with regulators. There is a lot of merit in those comments. Largely, that stems from the application of the precautionary principle in much of the field of law that we are discussing now. Materially diluting the precautionary principle in a substantial way would have all sorts of troublesome consequences, but, in my judgment, some kind of counterbalance, which is what the proportionality principle is seeking to do, would help temper the effects of that. There is a later amendment in the noble Lord’s name which would seek to modify the precautionary principle in quite a sensible way. But I agree that something needs to be done to ensure that that over-precautionism does not infect the application of these provisions.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, it is very difficult to talk about anything of substance in five minutes on a subject so central to this Government. But having talked with colleagues in the industry, I would like to make the following brief points. I declare my interests.

First, my colleagues are reassured by the sense of purpose and drive that the Government are demonstrating in this policy area. We need to help the Bill get on to the statute book soon, so that we can get building.

Secondly, the Bill needs to think more about building communities and place-making, not just about building more soulless housing estates. The Government are rightly committed to addressing a range of different problems: housing, health, crime, education and net zero. The lesson from the history of failed housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s by the public sector, and the worrying signs from too much of what is being built today, is that if we build homes in the wrong way, we will not only fail to help solve these problems but make them worse.

We need to build places and strong, humane cultures and communities, not just homes. If noble Lords are in any doubt what this means for local residents, they should take five minutes and listen to Billy Connolly’s description on YouTube of what happened to him and his family when they were moved out of their home and community in the Gorbals in Glasgow and placed in a soulless housing estate on the edge of town. No one can describe the experience more clearly than Billy.

My colleagues and I are working on addressing precisely these issues in projects across the country with some of our major developers, and we are happy to share with the Minister and her colleagues our 360-degree approach to place-making, which is focused on buildings and culture—maybe she can let me know if there is interest.

We are all very concerned about what happens to bats and newts, but how concerned are we about the young mother I was with a few months ago on a multimillion-pound new housing estate in east London whose two year-old was already picking up needles in the play area? We all need to think very carefully together about how we do not repeat those mistakes in this next phase of development.

Thirdly, it is good news that planning officers will be given greater responsibility to determine smaller applications, reserved matter submissions and schemes on allocated sites through a new proposed national scheme of delegation. This should lead to greater consistency of approach across local planning authorities, plus certainty and timeliness of decisions. The mandatory training of planning committee members should, in theory, also lead to greater consistency and certainty for applications that do not fit into the above national scheme of delegation.

Having sat on a planning committee for many years, I know how flawed these present processes are, and I have watched too many local councillors play political games with these local processes. I think His Majesty’s Opposition need to think more clearly about the connections between democracy and delivery. There needs to be more clarity in their thinking about this matter.

Fourthly, the nature restoration fund, hopefully, will remove the restriction on 160,000 homes stalled by nutrient neutrality restrictions by allowing developers to pay into a nature restoration fund that delivers habitat improvements at a regional scale, rather than requiring site-specific ecological mitigation for every scheme. This should speed up the delivery of sites. There are, however, concerns about Natural England’s ability to deliver a robust scheme on a timely basis.

Fifthly, the proposal in the Bill to speed up the delivery of nationally significant infrastructure projects is also much welcomed and should provide greater clarity and certainty over the delivery of these projects.

Having said all this positive news, I think there remain some challenges for business colleagues in the industry. The introduction of new cross-boundary regional strategic planning could be positive, driving a more joined-up approach towards housing, economic and infrastructure growth across LPAs. However, there are significant concerns about the potential delays to new local plans and housing schemes because of this structural change. LPAs, which remain critically underresourced are undergoing significant change through forthcoming devolution and the abolition of the two-tier authority system, which, when tied in with the need to deliver these regional strategies soon, mean there may be an awful lot of resource tied up in delivering restructuring and not delivering local plans and housing schemes, which are needed in the short term.

I finish with a reality check: the current length of timeframes for securing planning permission will likely not shrink by a significant amount. Bidding on a site now does not realistically generate volume for the large housing businesses until 2028, given the timescales associated with securing planning permission, selling consented land, securing reserve matters, signing Section 106 agreements, site preparation and the build and sale of homes. By and large, the Bill is seen by many in the housing industry as very positive, with several of the changes proposed leading to quicker, more consistent and more certain outcomes. However, this has to be set against the wider context and systematic issues present, which may limit the positive impact these reforms will have.

Local Government Reorganisation

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for his important question. It gives me an opportunity to clarify some of the misunderstanding around the number that has been given. It was in our manifesto that we would pursue a devolution agenda, and for many months after the Government were elected we were pushed to give an optimum number for the size of a council. Of course, when we did so, everyone said, “Not that number; that’s not the right number.” There is some flexibility around it. The important thing in the whole of this process is that the size, geography and demography of the units created make sense for people. We can be flexible around the numbers, but the number of 500,000 was intended to set out what we feel would be around the right size for the economies of scale and to deliver effective services at local level in a way that gives value for money.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister please inform the House of any work the Government have done on what the practical implications might be of this local government reorganisation on their encouraging plans to build 1.5 million homes during this Parliament? Will this reorganisation help speed up the delivery of these homes or, in practice, slow the whole process down? Can the Minister give us a clue as to how this will work in practice as public sector staff look for new jobs?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The intention is that this will help with the delivery of both growth and new homes. The intention, as set out quite clearly in the White Paper, is for mayors to have powers over strategic planning—not the local planning that local authorities currently do—so that they can work with the constituent councils in their areas to set out plans for housing. The noble Lord referred to issues of planning. We have put in a significant sum of money to improve the capacity for planning authorities as we take forward the programme of delivering 1.5 million homes.